Alias
by raedbard
Summary: SLASH: Through exploring each other, Oz and Giles regain themselves.


Title: Alias  
Author: Raedbard  
Fandom: BtVS  
Rating: R, I think...  
Pairing: Giles/Oz  
Timeline: Season 5 AU wherein Giles does go back to England and actually stays this time.  
Summary: Through exploring each other, Oz and Giles regain themselves.

ALIAS

**1.**

_A Taciturn Man_

He doesn't take in locations anymore. He has spent the long journey to England just putting one foot in front of the other, just plotting by road signs and rest stops. He doesn't really notice the monochrome banality of the highway from London to Bath because it seems to fit. He doesn't notice the music on the radio sporadically change to traffic reports and, as the roads give way to damp trees, to static. England itself is the perfect sensory soundtrack to this loss of himself. But despite the rightness of the greyish drizzle and the similarity he feels to this place, where everything is nebulous and polite and no-one asks you difficult questions, he knows enough to be sure that he is still running. This time it's a running-towards, a seeking, and England is just the through-way, albeit a familiar-feeling one. When the running is done he thinks maybe it'll be different.

The road curves his thoughts. It makes him wish for companionship and a warm place to sleep; a body to meet his needs with. Someone to define himself against, so that in the negative space he might recognise his own reflection and be something more than this two-legged beast.

His way becomes darkened by the heavy English trees, dripping their rain-soaked shadows on the hood of his van and muffling still further the accents on the radio. He reaches out, switches off the noise and settles his body back into the silence. He prefers this, though it is not a first choice. But he's not ready for the music yet.

_Silent Overseas Partner_

So it turned out that actually, yes, he does have a life. Of a kind. Rather a shallow life it was true, but something that was definitely his. Renewing his acquaintance with the British job market was his current aspiration and he had been concentrating hard enough on it that the lack of any texture to his new existence had gone past, thus far, without any internal comment. He was, in fact, rather surprised at how good he had become at ignoring the obvious.

Identity was obviously becoming something of what Buffy would call an 'issue' however. And it raised both a smile and a sick feeling in his belly to remember the children. He missed them and tried not to be hurt when they forgot to call him but really shouldn't he try to have friends his own age? He'd spent so long being the patriarch, being the embodiment of the very little they seemed to know about Britain, and simply being older than them. Wasn't it time to have an identity of his own? It was rather humiliating to realise that he needed to grow up and move on quite as much as they all did.

He had returned to his books; old friends they and full of comfort, if he had been able to settle into them for more than five minutes at a time. He finds the silence too heavy, pressing on him so that he can't hear the voices in the book on his lap. He reaches for the scotch bottle and listens to the liquid quietly singing instead.

**2.**

_The Savage Beast_

He raps at the door, hard, as though his hands are flung against the wood by the final momentum of his search. He's made it here and he can stop the running now. The last of his energy expended, he leans his shoulder against the doorframe, letting the rain that drips from the guttering run through his hair and down onto his face.

When the door opens he's a little surprised that there isn't a greater reaction: no pull of muscle or shifting in his gut, only the process of remembering the man standing in the doorway.

"Come inside."

He nods, his body already wanting the heat of both the room and the man, anticipating it across his back and down his spine. He moves forward cautiously, drawn to the fire burning inside. His senses are waking up now, trying to shake the apathy like he does the water in his hair. He looks up at the man and knows his name (_Giles..._) but not his own. The door closes, and for a second he feels trapped, but recognises that too. It seems right that Giles should be there to lock him in and keep the watch. He sags down on the couch and falls asleep.

_Mr. Protective Guy_

He doesn't know quite how to react to this appearance, this new version of the boy he knew, so he just gazes for a moment at the small body curled around itself, hidden behind the arm of his sofa. The young man looks ragged, incomplete. His hair is undyed, his nails unpainted. Giles feels a twinge of loss when he notices these absences and frowns, increasingly worried. He sits beside the sleeper and watches him, even retrieves a blanket from the chest at the foot of his bed, stepping quietly in his own house so that he does not wake the creature downstairs. Returning, Giles covers him over with the blanket, then sits down in a chair and waits.

Sometime in the long night he hears a cry. He stumbles the few steps over to the sofa and meets the boy's eyes. The fear in him is contained, but straining. Giles puts a hand on his shoulder, tries to soothe him, lets his fingers learn the new fragility of this body, which is hidden but undeniably present, beneath the tensed muscles.

"Cold..." the boy says.

"The fire's almost out. You've been asleep for hours."

"You watched?"

"I did."

"Thanks."

"My pleasure. Ah, would you like some tea? It's a little early for breakfast, but if you'd care for something?"

The boy shakes his head, "Pass on breakfast. Queasy. But tea is good."

Giles nods, "Tea it is, then."

Feet pad behind him to the kitchen. Giles makes the tea, remembering the past superfluity of words around this boy, how they always seemed to split and bend around him as ocean waves do the shifting shoreline. He would roll with the noise of the discourse, riff with it, but keep his shape underneath your words, remain essentially unchanged by them. Giles wonders if this is the same boy as he casts his eyes over the blanketed figure in his kitchen doorway.

"Here," he says handing the tea over. "It's not too strong, I hope."

"Doubt it," the boys says, moulding his hands to the warm shape of the only other mug Giles owns. "Like the slogan." He holds his hands up, opens his fingers. Giles reads the words, 'Kiss the librarian' on the yellow ceramic.

He blushes. "Ah, yes. Haven't really had much time for smartening up the place just yet. Sorry."

"S'okay. Like it."

Giles doesn't ask: 'why are you here' because he doesn't need or want to, not yet. Not while this pale young man still moves in his house.

**3.**

_Ironic Detachment Guy_

He finds, over the following days, that he's happiest in the rain on the grass outside the house. Close, but only in the sense of being nearby. The man is too much for him, in this new confusion of sense and awakening. So he stays here and thinks about the journey, about the little he can recall of the passing from the place before to the place now except the reason for the running. Kind of ironic that now he's here the only right place seems to be 'away'.

He's following the form of wherever he finds himself because that seems the easiest thing to do. The ordinary thing to do. While England is green and wet so shall he be, the memory of sunshine just a distant imagining.

He can smell the man coming out onto the grass and wants to turn to him, but does not, just curls his arms around his raised knees and rocks back against the knowledge that he's there.

"I'm trying not to be predictably British and make a remark about the weather."

"It's good. New."

"It's almost spring. Soon you'll have to share the grass with my snowdrops."

'Snowdrops' is a word he likes instantly. He likes the name and the myths it prompts him to invent to explain the naming - little spits of snow appearing to signal spring. Illogical, and attractive. Their shape lures him, makes him want to touch. But the man breaks his reverie:

"If you're staying that is."

A little breath in, a shift of muscles. He tries to make his body say 'I don't know yet' so he doesn't have to say the words, but before he can the man's hand is on his shoulder, then a patch of warmth on his neck.

_The Emotional Marathon Man_

A single moment, extended.

These are the moments when Giles feels inadequate, socially inept and backward. It's been some time (_one year - you've hardly become celibate_) since he attempted any initiation of an intimate touch or embrace. He wasn't aware of having missed it. But sudden potential, and the invitation of white skin and the one freckle almost hidden under the collar of the boy's t-shirt, creates choices Giles had forgotten he could find decisions for.

The stimulation he gets from the touch of his warm fingers to cold skin lets him know what his desired outcome is. But there are still questions remaining.

He understands one of the answers from the sudden solidity which takes over the boy's body, usually (he thinks 'usually' like it still holds some meaning) so fluid. His fancy would like to tell him that he feels the cold of his guest's neck carry through his own fingertips and up into his own skin, but he long ago stopped heeding thoughts like those. He pulls his hand back from the contact and rests it on his knees, and waits.

The boy stays still, not a breeze in the air to shift him one way or the other.

Giles lets his hand drift from his knee to the grass and, palm flat and wet with the new rain, he splays out his fingers so that they all point due Oz. This makes him smile and sigh. There is contentment in the bare desire to touch him, in having a desire at all. That is enough for now.

**4.**

_Dramatic Gesture Guy_

Change comes through him with the first hints of spring, charting the peak of the moon cycle, releasing him back to his senses at the time when he is furthest from the wolf. There is one day, whose name and position in the calendar he does not know, when he wakes with sensation. He wakes feeling his body arch beneath the bedsheets, open and living. The bed, unnoticed in the past days - a place to crash, warm, safe and uninteresting - became the first recipient of his renewed attention. No detail is too small as touch tickles him in his fingertips. Sheets are taken and stroked, picked at, pulled; he parses their form in his hands and lets out a smile.

Sunlight from the small uncurtained window, high in the attic roof, draws him from bed and, reluctant, he leaves his bed behind and takes the three steps across to stand beneath the window. There he stretches his limbs, elongating his back and inflating his ribcage up and to the sky in one long breath. The sun is bright but pleasant. He basks for a while, a wolf in the mad English sun.

It's smell that rouses him; the irresistible and somehow very British smell of bacon frying, just about to be laid out on white bread and doused with vinegar-smelling brown sauce. He feels his gut leap and plead to be paid attention.

He's hungry, really hungry.

They don't speak over the breakfast. His throat is tight with desire for bacon and his tongue occupied with the periodic wash of sweet tea into his mouth. The man just sits, silent and watching him; he thinks the man is content at that and so he is content too, for the moment. Once they have finished, the man washes dishes. He stands in the sun, back turned, the high sunlight picking out rare golds and reds in his hair. The boy watches, still and intent, and then he reaches.

_The Over-the-Hill Shopkeeper_

He doesn't flinch exactly, because that would imply that the boy's touch was undesired, but he feels his back, the muscles of his shoulders and arms stiffen. He has to hold on to the yellow mug tight in case it crashes from his hands and into the sink.

"Giles..." he hears from behind him. His name sounds new from the boy's lips, re-given. So he has to turn, has to look.

The boy seems new as well, re-made with bacon and sunlight and spring. he hadn't noticed; had been too busy not to notice. But now that face that had never been given to anything more than brief flights into demonstration - a quick shift or slide to say either _ecstatic_ or _afraid_ - now that face is opening. He is smiling, open. He reaches out, and Giles is glad he does because, right now, he doesn't think he could move in the face of that smile.

His hand - smaller than his but sharp and strong - reaches first for Giles' arm, squeezes it briefly, almost as if checking to see if life still exists there, then moves to rest in the centre of his chest, creating a patch of vital warmth there. The other hand joins it, pressing and stroking. The boy's touch is insistent, unexpected in its forcefulness. The young man demands and takes, and before Giles has quite thought the word _lover_, Oz has reached for his mouth.

**5.**

_Supportive Boyfriend Guy_

He claims and relearns. It's quick; over before ten minutes has passed - urged towards the bedroom by a jerk of the other's head, he declined with a shake of his and pushed the man down to the tiled floor, his fingers too close to the man's zipper to be displaced now. He doesn't undress Giles, doesn't want to, suddenly aware that he believes that naked flesh belongs to peace and time together, not the frantic rush to come that he has just embarked on. It is safe, he knows, to race to the release this time; there will be_ next time_

But now is the thing, minute by minute. He doesn't undress Giles, just unbuttons his jeans and pulls up his shirt; kneads the denim with his cheek; pulls the opening wide; urges Giles' hips up with a hard stroke of his fingers across the man's hips; frees his cock, semi-erect, from the jeans. The shift from one to the next takes less than a few seconds each but they each embed desire and need, and so, in a moment tender and slow, he covers Giles' body with him own.

They don't fuck, not 'properly', because they're lying on a kitchen floor and are less than prepared. Rather, they shift their hips and sing in moans, and he whispers _Giles_ and Giles shouts_ Oz_.

Later, after the next time, Oz basks in the sun again, chest bare and white, his veins full and throbbing. Giles' bed has cool (_both senses_) linen sheets and now he thinks this may be a kind of heaven.

_A God of Acoustic Rock_

His face aches a little from all the smiling, not to mention the extensive oral exploration of the smallish, pale body that lies, semi-sprawled across his legs. He hasn't felt this kind of satisfied exhaustion for a very long time. He shifts his head a little into the sun which slants down across the pillow; the warmth cheers him, it seems fitting. He can feel Oz's breath close on his neck. There comes a slight kiss, easily given, with nonchalance and without expectation which is just how, had he ever stopped to think about it, he would have imagined Oz kissing a lover. He smiles again, grins actually, and turns to his lover and meets the young man's open mouth with his own.

"Mmmm, you're good," Oz says, after.

"I, er, have been told that before," Giles says, unsure whether to give into the blush or the bravado. "I think I forgot the power in all _this_."

Oz nods, "Yeah. Probably better though, to forget."

"Yes, probably. After all, it is rather pleasant to be reminded."

Then Oz smiles, brief and Californian. "Hey, do you think we could maybe put some music on?"


End file.
